Henry is not only an alcoholic, but he is a poorly functioning one. When he turns up 2 hours late to his ex-wife's house to attend the birthday party of his twelve-year-old daughter (with wine and cigarettes as his gift), he gets thrown out and goes on a typically heavy bender. The next morning he wakes up in a park, and heads to see his drinking buddy Mike to find out what happened, only to find that 10 years have passed and, while everyone assumed Henry had died, it does seem like he somehow time travelled.
There is a broad silliness to Bender which you can pick up on pretty much just from hearing the plot; this continues into the film and the idea does lend itself for comedy since all aspects of it are broad, and it does fit into the sort of stoner comedies that are so popular (albeit with alcohol here). Mostly this broadness of idea and comedy works – the film describes itself as a "crowd-pleaser" and I think that is true since it is inoffensive, good-humoured, and generally quite amusing. I say generally because it does fall short of where it should be. The film really is too long and not consistently funny enough to carry the time; while the sense of amusement is throughout the film, there are not as many good solid laughs as there should be. For sure there was scope for more sharpness, and the "2003 man lost in 2013" material needed to be tighter and stronger than just stumbling over iPads and Facebook.
This continues in the second half, where a barmaid character is introduced even though she doesn't feel like a natural fit to the film, and doesn't add much as a character (apart from a suggestion at the end which makes no sense or impact). The narrative doesn't have a particularly strong ending – it sort of does what you expect, but the sense of fun silliness is long gone, and it does feel like a missed opportunity. Helping it out though is a really fun central performance from Klaitz – whose voice and recognized only to look at IMDb and find that he played Lester in GTA5). He gets the humour and plays his loser well throughout – other cast members not so strong, but he is fun. Technically it is very professional and polished in all aspects – just a shame that the material wasn't sharper and tighter, because while it is generally amusing, there was scope here for it to be much better than it was.
